Sometimes,
the best way to understand the shape of a specific nationalism is to look at
its more liberal adherents. The bellicose blusterings of flag-wavers are
roughly similar in each country: you can try to distinguish between your Nigel
Farages, Donald Trumps, Modis and Erdogans, but the heat at the surface can
make it harder to delve into the depths of national meaning.

What’s
often more interesting is the bits of a hegemonic nationalism that are so
embedded that even those who blush at words like ‘nationalist’ will repeat them
in what they think is a calm, ‘rational’ tone. And it’s with that in mind that
we should turn to the Guardian’s
editorial page.

For
context, the Northern Irish Assembly collapsed more than a year ago under the
pressure of a DUP financial scandal and the broad crisis of Brexit. This week,
Theresa May and Leo Varadkar, the Irish Taoiseach, went to Belfast hoping to
secure a deal to reassemble the Assembly. One of the key stumbling blocks was
that the DUP was unwilling to sign up to an Irish Language Act.

“The
darker truth here is that Sinn Féin has chosen to weaponise the language
question for political ends, less to protect a minority than to antagonise
unionists. Unionists have duly been antagonised. The Gaelic language is the
main tongue of a mere 0.2% of the Northern Ireland population. Around 10% claim
to understand it to some degree (perhaps just a few phrases). But Sinn Féin
does not do things accidentally. Its proposals have become a weapon of
tribalism in communities where identity politics always looms large and
divisively. Fears that Irish may be made compulsory in schools, that a language
qualification might become a job requirement and that street signs would be
made bilingual are not all well grounded. But some are. Bilingual road signs,
for instance, would take the issue into every street in Northern Ireland, with
pointless provocative effect.”

There are
a few details the Guardian seem to have forgotten here. An Act to protect the
Irish language isn’t just some wheeze concocted by Sinn Fein to troll the
Orange Order. The 2006 St Andrews Agreement required the British government to
ensure such an Act was passed, and, as the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission
points out, “the Northern Ireland (St Andrews
Agreement) Act 2006 introduced a statutory duty on the Northern Ireland
Executive to adopt strategies to ‘enhance and protect the development of the
Irish language’ and to ‘enhance and develop the Ulster Scots language, heritage
and culture’”.

“All of
these commitments are” the Commission notes “awaiting implementation.”

As well
as having the backing of the human rights commission, the proposed Irish
Language Act is also supported by all three cross-community parties represented
in the Assembly – the Greens, Alliance (the Northern Irish sister party of the
Lib Dems) and People Before Profit.

Then
there’s the reason that this issue re-emerged: it flared up when DUP communities
minister Paul Givan slashed
funding for the Irish language in December 2016, in what looked like an
effort to distract from the controversial Renewable Heat Incentive scheme. But,
according to the Guardian, it’s Sinn Fein who are “weaponising the language for
political ends”.

Then, of
course, there’s the matter of the European Charter on Minority Languages, under
which Britain is supposed to be protecting the Irish language in Northern
Ireland.

But all
of that is detail. The real point here is this.

The lack
of people speaking Irish in Northern Ireland isn’t just the result of the
inevitable supremacy of English. It’s the product of brutality over centuries –
from the plantations to Cromwell’s mass murder to the 1831 Education Act, with
which British colonists forced Irish people to learn in English rather than
their native tongue; to the violence of the famine and the vast exodus it
triggered; to the oppression of Catholic communities which triggered the civil
rights movement in the 1960s.

Looked at
over centuries, the decline of the Irish language is best understood as a
product of what Tomás Mac Síomóin, among others, describe as the cultural genocide of Ireland.

It is in
this context that we should look again at that Guardian editorial: where it
deplores moves to revive a language as divisive, because the elimination of it
has been so successful that only a few thousand people in the North still speak
it; where the victims of this oppression are dismissed as ‘tribal’, while the
hatred of those who detest diversity goes unchallenged.

Of course
the Irish language is political: it’s always political for marginalised
minorities to express themselves. It’s always political to defend diversity in
the face of those who demand a monochrome society.

But in
its rush to parrot the lines of the DUP, what the Guardian misses is a
fascinating trend: what we see now bubbling into the most precarious bit of
Britain’s high politics is a long term, underlying trope deep within the psyche
of Britishness.

We’ve
become familiar with it in Scotland too, where increasingly panicked British
nationalists are becoming ever more obsessed with laughing at or complaining
about Gaelic and Scots tongues, moaning about the invented costs of adding
place names in different languages to road signs, and endlessly claiming that
“Gaelic was never spoken here” about places whose names are clearly derived
from Gaelic words (for the record, Gaelic was spoken almost everywhere in
Scotland at some time or another). While legislation defending Gaelic and Scots
was brought in by the previous Labour/Lib Dem Executive, it’s often attacked as
an SNP and nationalist project.

And of
course, it’s a trope with which many in Wales and Cornwall and among Britain’s Gypsy
and traveller communities are familiar.

This
tells us a number of vital things.

Anglonormativity
hasn’t gone anywhere. The fact that the Guardian allowed someone to write such
nonsense under the paper’s own byline shows that even Britain’s most
progressive mainstream newspaper is unwilling to do the deep work of
decolonising its soul. Those who hoped Britain would be able to reinvent itself
as a pluralinational polity seem have been deluding
themselves.

In fact,
it seems like Englishness and Britishness are, for many, merging more than ever
as Anglo-British nationalism seems to be swallowing Unionism. To
understand this distinction, it’s important to understand that the Unionist
party manifesto in Scotland in 1951 spent much of its time making clear that it
was the party which defended Scotland’s place as its own nation within a union
of equals, where Labour was the party of the British state and the SNP the
party of independence.

Unionism in
Scotland was represented by Tory lawyers defending Scotland’s separate legal
system whilst happily waving a union flag, middle class teachers defending
Scotland’s distinct education system within the UK, and the clergy defending
the autonomy of the Church of Scotland under the broad umbrella of the British
state. Historically, Welsh Tories and Welsh Labour were as happy to speak in
Welsh as were Plaid Cymru members.

In
Northern Ireland, the arch unionist the Rev Dr Ian Paisley described himself as
both Irish and British: his unionism meant that for
him, those were complementary identities.

But as
the deep crisis of the British state unfolds, it seems that the acceptance of
national pluralism which has ebbed and flowed in the 300 year history of the UK
is on the wane. Instead, it is being replaced by the reassertion of Englishness
as Britishness; the demand for conformity around the dominant culture within
the union, rather than the construction of each separate national identity as
equally British.

Demands
for linguistic conformity are, like all attacks on freedom of speech, a sign of
fear. And if this is anything to go by, Anglo-British nationalists are very
worried indeed.

When languages die, every poem ever written in them goes, every song
sung in them loses its meaning, a whole understanding of the world is snuffed
out.

Whilst the Irish language – with its own state – is unlikely to
disappear anytime soon, the existence of the language in the north represents a
cultural diversity whose value can never be measured with the tools of a
capitalist society: it’s no coincidence that across the world, there is a
direct and close correlation between language diversity and biodiversity. And
just as game-keepers kill wildlife because they fear competition, colonists
always do what they can to purge indigenous languages, because diversity
threatens their power.

And when Britain’s most progressive newspaper joins in with that
process, it tells us that Anglo-British nationalism feels like it’s facing deep
threats.

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